Preserving the Ornamental Garden: How to Dry Flowers, Leaves, Stems, and Pods for Crafting

Collecting flowers, leaves, stems, and pods from the garden now will give you a treasure trove of beautiful dried plants to craft with all year long. Read on to learn how to dry flowers, as well as leaves, stems, and seed pods from your garden, plus some creative projects you can try with them. You’ll be pleasantly surprised when you see how much beauty is left behind once the blooms fade.

The garden provides fun and nourishment every month of the year. Spring brings salad and other vegetables from winter plantings. Summer provides berries, fruit, and tender salad leaves; and herbs are ready to harvest for the coming year’s teas, pestos and scented sachets. Fall is the time for harvesting all the good food remaining so we can dry or freeze it for winter dinners.

Let us not forget, though, that in summer the garden is also full of beautiful flowers, both perennials and annuals. These fill the house with perfume and delight us with their color. By fall, the flowers are losing their petals, just as the trees lose their colorful leaves.

When to Harvest

The flowers leave behind interesting seed pods and dried stalks which are wonderful for crafts. Don’t be too hasty with the pruners, as many species just dry in the garden and can be picked in mid-fall.

For more fragile plants, it is best to pick a collection of stems when they look their best in the garden.

To preserve tender leaves and colorful petals, harvest them at their peak of color and place them on pages of last year’s telephone book under weights. The paper in these books is absorbent and provides lots of space to dry the flowers. I have tried plant presses but store-bought ones only hold a small number, so I made my own bigger one. As you can imagine, you can press many specimens in the pages of a phone book.

Now Get Crafty!

I’m sure you can think of many crafts to make with these lovely plants. My favorite uses are:

To make pictures like this one:To make cards for the winter holidays or for many other uses such as thank-you notes, birthdays, and for craft fairs or gifts.

To make herbal tea sachets or scented sachets from herbs and sweet scented flowers to tuck into drawers and cupboards.

To make wreaths that last all year long.

To make bouquets from the dried flowers for winter use. They have the wonderful quality of not requiring watering when we head out for warmer climes in the winter. I also buy inexpensive pottery vases and make long-lasting floral gifts for autumn and winter hostesses.

My favorite plants for dried for arrangements are:

Rose

Hydrangea

Luneria

Oregano/Sage

Golden Hop

Sedum

Wild Grasses, Ornamental Grasses, Sedges, Common Rush

Mahonia (Oregon grape) leaves, stems and berries

Pearly Everlasting

Echinops

Eryngium

Pods – large poppies, Monarda, Siberian iris, Nigella, daylily

Now go grab some clippers and head out to the garden for a treasure hunt. In the colder winter months when the garden has been put to bed, you will be glad that you did!

Perform consider all the ideas you’ve got introduced with your post. They may be very convincing which enable it to certainly work. Still, the posts are very quick for starters. May just you please lengthen them a lttle bit from next time? Thanks for that post.

Hi, I’m Stephanie. Gardening healed me from a debilitating illness and so I know the power of garden therapy first hand.

Here you will find DIY garden projects and crafts that break down barriers and allow anyone to garden, no matter their ability, knowledge, or even garden size. Browse through our projects and you will surely find one that will inspire you to get out and get dirty, try a project, and fall in love with the garden!

Take a Peek Inside Garden Made:

Privacy & Cookies

This site uses cookies from Google to deliver its services, to personalize ads and to analyze traffic. Information about your use of this site is shared with Google. By using this site, you agree to its use of cookies. Learn more

Disclaimer

This website contains general information about gardening, natural beauty, crafts, DIY projects, and recipes. The information is not advice, and should not be treated as such. While we do our best to provide useful information, any reliance you place on such information is strictly at your own risk and not a substitute for medical, legal, or any other professional advice of any kind.